Man of culture
I’m surprised more people haven’t used “hentai starring underaged teens is cool as long as the viewer is a teen as well” as a defense.
I would like to propose that there might be orders of magnitude differences in severity between trafficking flesh and blood children (your statement here seems to suggest that all he did was “go awooga” over them) and being attracted to an anime girl who is canonically underage.
Especially since if you put Asuka and Misato in the same outfit, then showed them to randoms in the street and said “which one is the child” they would not be able to answer consistently.